Natural Child is a trio from Nashville TN. When you hear Nashville, the immediate association is country music. These three guys though, sound like they could be from Atlanta or Memphis. What we have here is a garage rock dealing. And it’s a lucky draw.
They’ve been playing together for a few years. Wes and Murph were long time friends, discovering music together, united in their love for The Rolling Stones and Neil Young and they decided to form a band together. Marv on drums joined later. After some singles, the first record appropriately entitled 1971 came out in 2011. Indeed, it sounded like music that was brought over to us after a time machine trip from 40 years before us.
This year sees the group extremely busy. In breaks of their constant touring arrangement, they recorded the new album For The Love Of The Game in their practice barn, so it has that immediate live feel to it as you’d think it should.
The sound of the band is a typical power trio. All three instruments are playfully arranged together and every instrument is up in front of the mix. Singing is often in a duet between the bassist Wes and guitarist Murph.
The songs are carefully crafted and there’s a lot of dynamical range to them. Third song Baby sounds like it could be a great single outside of the record, and other songs build up an atmosphere of a developing record and it rolls down the grooves like a snowball down the hill. This is something that really makes this record great and something that we miss from the old classic rock lps. This sort of atmosphere is only interrupted a few times, once with a drunken sing-along No One Writes Sad Songs Anymore which shows a great competence of the band as classical songwriters. Well, you can’t live in Nashville and not learn how to write good songs. And then there’s Paradise Heights, reggae tinted tune that wouldn’t be out of place in Joe Strummer’s repertoire. Finally, there’s a cover of Tom T. Hall’s That’s How I Got To Memphis, which is not only a direct proof that the bands knows the history of rock and country extremely well, but also that they have excellent musical tastes.
The fun-packed record clocks out at the 37-th minute. The vinyl print sounds very good, but I could not identify what record plant mastered and printed the record. And just as I type this review, I’m finding out that there’s a brand new Natural Child record out already, barely half a year after For The Love Of The Game, and it’s called Hard In Heaven. Meet the hardest working band in the business!
First published on rockxs.com.
This show is dominated by several new names today. First, we have the Connection – a power pop band from Portsmouth, NH. They are joined by Wyatt Funderbunk as a guest, who we also have for the first time. Then we have the Black Oil Brothers, an interesting unpretentious mixture of traditional blues and other types of art. For instance, on their site you can download a nice story of a struggling painter. Another new name are the Australian band The Murlocks. We also have some good old friends here with new music. Singing Loins are about to put out the new record called Here on Earth and David Eugene Edwards is back with another Woven Hand release. Nick Cave invited Mark Lanegan to sing on the soundtrack for the movie that he wrote Lawless.
In the past decade or so, we witnessed a surge of reunions, particularly of bands that meant something in the seventies and the eighties. Some of the bands just tour, perhaps make a live album and try to relive the past without changing much. Others make new records. Often times the motive is to draw larger crowds to the gigs than each band member would individually, or perhaps these bands simply want to go back to the youthful years. In any case, reunions are typically in shadows of the famous past. Exceptions to the rules are scarce. I can only think of Mission of Burma and their reunion album On Off On which is as great as anything they did before, if not better, more mature and stronger piece. Now we have a new example in Redd Kross.
Three rocking returns today. ZZ Top open the show with a new heavy rocker from their new record La Futura. Dinosaur Jr also rock with a new song from the new record I Bet On Sky. And Ian Hunter is back with a playful new record When I’m President. On the power pop front, we introduce the new artist, a librarian from Portland, Maine, Kurt Baker. Juliana Hatfield is back with a new untitled record. And then we have two new live albums, one for Los Lobos and other for Joe Strummer. Actually, the latter is a combination of an anthology and a live record from his days with The Mescaleros.
Eamon McGrath comes from Canada. He grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, Canadian Western province, North of the US state of Montana, with lots of prairies. This is where he started to come up with his first songs, recording them in his house and distributing them around on cd-rs to friends and fans. There is about 15 to 20 of those proto albums that he made in very small amount of copies and it is unclear what exactly is contained in those releases. Perhaps some songs repeated in multiple versions, but what we can tell for sure, they were all recorded relatively cheaply in lo-fi technology.
Singer singwriters today… some of the greatest ever. Dan Stuart, founding member of the Green On Red is finally back with with his second ever solo album, the first since his excellent debut Can O’Worms in 1995. The new album is called The Deliverance of Marlowe Billings. Italian band Sacri Cuori backs him up for this effort. Then we have Patti Smith who also has a new record out called Banga. Grant Hart is preparing a new solo double album called The Argument based on Milton’s poem Paradise Lost. The album is still not out, but two songs from it came out on a 45. Jon Dee Graham was recently in Cleveland, at Beachland Tavern and he’s in our Live in Cleveland segment. He also has a new album out Garage Sale which I picked at the show. And then there’s the new album from the guy on the picture. We say goodbye to Scott McKenzie, who sadly died recently. Finally, we have an exclusive new tune from a Zagreb band Vex And The Voxtones, who will participate on the upcoming tribute to The Records.
When the story of Husker Du ended in 1988, Grant Hart briefly started a solo career, only to put together a new band in 1990 called Nova Mob with two of his Minneapolis friends: Tom Merkl on bass and Michael Crego on drums. The group’s first album was something nobody wanted from Grant Hart in 1991. It was a rock opera with a seemingly bizarre libretto. It was a make believe story with real life characters about the engineer of the Nazi V8 bomb and one of the leaders of the US space program, Wernher Von Braun. In the opera, Von Braun finds himself towards the end of the World War Two on a losing side with a desire to escape. In a prayer to Germanic god Woton, Von Braun asks for an ability to travel in time, which Woton grants through a gateway. Von Braun first travels in future, he learns out about all the space achievements which he would end up contributing in the 50s and 60s. In his adventures, Von Braun runs into the Roman lawyer Pliny.
First half of the show is filled with the fresh end-of-summer singles for King Louie’s Missing Monuments, Turf War and new the band from San Diego Plateaus lead by the singer songwriter Jon Green. Other new bands today are Mrs. Magician also from Sand Diego, Rat Colums from San Francisco and Future Primitives from South Africa. Left Lane Cruiser joins forces with James Leg in a cover of Sway. The show closes another new name here, soul singer Etta Britt from Nashville who has a nice new duet with legendary Delbert McClinton.
Today we say goodbye to two rock’n’roll artists from two different eras, but equally revered here at the Little Lighthouse. Bill Doss, one of the founders of Olivia Tremor Control and Elephant Six collective passed away on July 30th this year. He was only 43. Also, legendary Motowon bassist Bob Babbitt passed away on July 16th from the damages caused by brain cancer. He was 74. John Hiatt is here with the new record and we also have two more new artists today. Snowgoose is a band from Scotland, fronted by their wonderful singer Anna Sheard. Christian Bland from Black Angels and Lee Blackwell from Night Beats have a new duet out there in Austin called The UFO Club.